Item — HN Reader

I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource.

That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems, but it's more the hostility (something which we're trying to address[1]) that's the problem than the stance against active discussion.

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-...

2 comments

It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, should.

But why are we talking about shoulds that will never get done when a really good answer is already here? You've got users actively providing good content and your response is to reprimand them and tell them that content should be over here instead? You know, we have these things called links on the world wide web. The internet isn't running out of them.

Sometimes it feels like the mods are building a really tidy card catalog at the expense of the books in the collection.

While I'm ranting, I'll just note that the position that there's a canonical way to ask every question and a that there exists a single acceptable answer is a fairly absurd proposition that, once accepted, leads to all kinds of equally absurd behavior.

This is by far the worst problem with Stack Overflow. The mods seem to leap at the chance to mark questions that are similar, but not identical, as duplicates.

There's one easy fix for this, and several other problems with SO: Don't close duplicate questions. Just cross-reference them.

Reasons:

  - Gets rid of the "This was closed because of trigger-happy
    moderators failing to distinguish between 'similar' and
    'identical'" problem by making that situation impossible.

  - Improves answer discovery for users: If Google gets you
    to almost, but not quite, the right question, 
    cross-referencing gets you the rest of the way.

  - Improves answer discovery for users: Maybe the best answer
    today isn't the same as the best answer 5 years ago.

  - Improves gamification: Rewards are the lifeblood of
    a site like Stack Overflow.  A way of dealing with
    duplicate questions that rewards users for 
    cross-referencing them is infinitely more in line with
    SE's basic idea than one that punishes them with
    public shaming. 

  - Reduces opportunity for petty bureaucrats to take root.

  - Represents a more thoughtful, measured way of thinking
    about software engineering.  Many questions really can
    have more than one correct answer, or the correct answer
    can depend on subtle details.  Which answer gets the
    green check mark may have as much to do with the situation
    of the asker than the quality of the answer.

Absolutely right. And this is also the way every other bug tracker on the planet works.

(Yes, I think SO looks like a bug tracker used as a discussion forum. They're certainly very close, including hostile project owners, WONTFIX's, etc.)

Interesting observation. Recall that Joel Spolsky got his start with FogBugz, a bug tracker. Think that might have informed the design?

That's exactly what closing duplicates does: cross references it to the original. If someone wants to post new information, they can do it on the original.

Yes, they can. But they won't. (For various reasons, but primarily because it won't get any attention. Nobody likes yelling into the void.)

An alternative to shaming is that you could just accept this great new content that a volunteer is giving you.

There is a badge for exactly that - Necromancer ( http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/17/necromancer ): Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more.

Whenever a question gets a new post it gets bumped up to the top of the activity again - the same amount of possible attention as when an hour old question gets a new answer too.

Yes. I shouldn't have said nobody. I actually like answering old questions, for example. I've earned that badge 10 times :)

What it really comes down to, though, is that when somebody asks a new question, I want to answer their new question, with all of its subtleties, in response to its particular phrasing, in its context.

It depends on the question. If it previously didn't have an answer or only had one, it goes to the top. If it had 5 OK answers and you add a 6th really awesome one, the ranking doesn't change much - expect it to be totally ignored.

It does cross-reference them. But read the rest of my bullet points. It isn't just about cross-referencing. It's about cross-referencing in a way that encourages a vital community that resonates with SE's gamified nature by keeping the site fun for all players.

Closing with a link to the original is cross-referencing in a way that does just the opposite: It decreases the vitality of the community by taking away opportunities for newcomers to take part in the gamification feature.

Let's frame the issue another way: What's Stack Overflow really for? Is it for people to ask questions and get answers? Or is it just a gamified Wikipedia?

The number of times I've come across a question that was marked as a dupe, and the linked to question it was "duping" had nothing to do with my issue pretty much means anytime I see an SO link, I know I'm in for a world of hurt, bad answers, and links to no where.

SO has hurt the industry more than helped, I believe.

It doesn't take a mod to mark as dupe. Five normal users or one with a gold badge in the tag the question is in suffice. Took me a bit by surprise the first time I closed a question with just my own vote.

It reminds me of the Wikipedia "notability" fight from early last decade. The cost of adding an extra page to Stackoverflow/Wikipedia is beyond trivial, there is no reason to restrict additions except to please these mods who want to build a tidy card catalog.

It's almost like there should be a mechanism when marking a question as a duplicate to automatically move the answers from the new question to the old question... along with a 301 redirect on the removed-as-duplicate URL.

Not sure if that would work since most "duplicate" questions are similar but not identical. Therefore an answer responding to the duplicates' specific use-case would be confusing in the context of the original question. Perhaps include the duplicate question in the answer when it's merged. Hidden behind a link e.g "This answer was posted in response to a duplicate question" and a link to view the content of the duplicate question.

This, and a thousand times this.

If a question gets asked more, maybe having more indexed landing pages for it for search engines will make it easier to find. It seems to be a popular question after all! Why limit yourself to just one answer?

A closed question isn't automatically deleted, so the search engines can still find it. You'll just need to click another link to find the answers.

Theoretically it's better to have all the answers in one place instead of scattered about, so that you can compare and contrast them. In practice it's far from ideal. Often a new question will generate a fresh take on an answer, and the diversity would be welcome.

If there's a subtle difference between the "duplicate" question and the older one, you can edit it to highlight the difference. Unfortunately that's hard to do, and you're unlikely to get the reopen votes even if you do a good job.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time.

However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.

On the other hand, in the past few years I've found that all of the most useful Stack Overflow or P.SE pages I've found when Googling for information have turned out to be questions with 25+ upvotes, with answers having 50ish upvotes. And all closed as "not constructive."

It's certainly staying on track, but it's worth noting that many track-related analogies are pejoratives that focus on the way that you can't steer vehicles that go on tracks. I suspect an inordinate amount of incoming traffic to Stack Exchange is for information that only Stack Exchange apparently thinks (not just by the closing, but by the choice of words in explaining the reason for the closing) is not particularly valuable. Methinks that's evidence that the community governance has become an echo chamber - otherwise one should think that the people running this company would have identified a gap in the market that they could be exploiting by now.

I started slant.co for this.

Closed question: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/2254/what-are...

Open Question: http://www.slant.co/topics/1150/~what-are-the-best-keyboards...

Yeah slant is ok, but still needs more users/moderation to be as useful as SO (even despite questions getting closed). Eg I browse to http://www.slant.co/topics/799/~what-are-the-best-continuous... and it lists 'Visual Studio default theme' as an option with one recommendation. So I signed in but I see no way to tell a mod that it doesn't belong there? (I could add a con saying 'This is not a CI' though)

(couldn't reply to the child comment)

>Only some minor points, for the rest I really like the interface and functionality:

Thanks :) Do you like what we did with the sources? (example: http://bit.ly/1va9Aj6. The favicons act like tabs if you didn't notice)

- it's a tad confusing that in a list with questions every question has 3 links. Two of them are the same (queston title itself 'See All Options') so I'd remove the latter as it doesn't really add anything useful imo.

Good point. I'll double check with the analytics in the morning and see if we can simplify.

- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means

It's very opaque at the moment as I'm experimenting with various sorting algorithms almost weekly. Once I nail something down I'll work on the UI transparency.

- a built-in way to link questions wouldn't be bad. For example there's a 'What are the best over-ear headphones under $200?' but also a 'What are the best over/on ear headphones around $300?' and in the latter the Sennheiser HD598 wins while it doesn't in the former. Something like a 'This is Related To' button which then pops up something similar to SO's duplicate question window.

We're building this! Not only "this is related to" but the ability to easily sync/add pro's from one occurrence of an option to another. (Yep, I'm aware of the potential issues with changing context, it's not going to be an auto sync, more like "suggested pros/cons/sources")

- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates

This is part of the same flagging project I'm in the middle of.

- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?

I keep going back and forth on this. A lot of people add pros/cons to be good community members, not necessarily due to them personally agreeing with them. I think it will end up being a checkbox that's enabled by default.

Thanks so much for taking the time to help us out! I'll keep working away until you describe Slant as "amazing" instead of "ok" :)

(btw if you want to help us shape the product even further we have a meta.slant.co)

> Do you like what we did with the sources?

oh yes, that's nice. Bug (on FF) though: the favicon disappears after having clicked on a tabs.

Your effort/enthusiasm sounds good for the rest :]. I'll check meta.

I'm honestly really sorry about that, we're in the middle of building a flagging system at the moment. Up until now we typically have been using the comment to moderate but this is obviously really inefficient.

I removed that option, thanks for pointing that out. We have a long way to go on the moderation side of things.

Anything else you don't like/wish we had?

Only some minor points, for the rest I really like the interface and functionality:

- it's not clear to me what the 'Best' sorting option means

- which reminds me: not sure if it can be done but eventually you'll probably need a way to remove or rather merge duplicates

- just figured that after adding a pro, I still have to vote for it. It would make sense to do this automatically?

Wouldn't this be easily solved by adding a "discussion" link from the question page to a wiki/forum page for more free-form or reddit-vote style questions?

Isn't Jeff Atwoods working on Discourse right now?

A good online community comes from the users and the management, not the software.

Isn't Discourse software aimed at improving internet forums rather than a discussion venue in itself? It's not comparable to stackexchange, which is software plus a community.

But stack-everything only has such a vibrant and focused community because community rules have been made as clear as they have. If you go through Jeff Atwoods blog, you'll see that they are making the same considerations for Discourse, which has it's own "community rules" that ship with it. They're not only writing better forum software, they're also investigating what makes great forums great and horrible forums horrid and they're baking it into their product.

What do you think about Quora?

Isn't that the spammy site that insists you log in to view answers? I always took it as another Experts Exchange.

Wait, these are different sites??

The "?share=1" guys? Mostly useless.

What exactly does it do? And is this a bad practice?

>What exactly does it do?

It does this:

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/43179/how-can-i-r...

And it's officially supported:

https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better

But you still need to sign up/in in to casually browse.

>And is this a bad practice?

It's pretty user hostile which is why I personally never used the site.

That hiding answers to people who aren't logged in is user-hostile.

Targets a different audience with different kinds of questions.